The future relationships between DVR, nDVR and TVoD

Network DVR is coming but most observers predict that the in-home DVR will survive for many years and some are predicting that the local hard drive will continue to provide an essential cache for the near-live time-shifting (like rewind 30 seconds, rewind 30 minutes) that accounts for a notable part of our non-linear viewing. DVR and nDVR will become less distinct, as concepts, and more of a technology continuum. Over time, many consumers will neither notice or care about the technical differences.

The widespread adoption of nDVR will also blur the boundaries between the time-shifting and on-demand services we have come to know. Though loosely defined even today, nDVR, catch-up TV and TV on-demand have their own distinct flavours right now. But they are built upon common headend and backoffice technologies and that means it would be very easy to converge them in future – so the question is whether platform operators will allow them to fuse.

In the beginning, their hands could be tied; content rights, like how soon content is made available on-demand, and how long it remains available, might keep the nDVR, catch-up and TVoD experiences apart. But if platform operators are given a free hand, will they seek to maintain these concepts as separate consumer experiences, ensuring differentiation in functionality and so possibly pricing?

DVR has a strong brand, if you want to put it that way. As Daniel Simmons, Director at the research and consulting firm IHS Technology, notes: “Catch-up services are typically free, with DVR often being a premium service, differentiated by live pause, rewind and the fact that the user can decide what content is stored and for how long.”

Some commentators expect a long-term convergence of the on-demand ‘experiences’. Jason Blackwell, Director, Service Provider Strategies for the Digital Consumer Practice at the research firm Strategy Analytics, thinks nDVR and catch-up could merge, though it will differ by region and operator. “It will be dependent on content rights deals, content availability windows, business models, and even type of content,” he says. 

Nigel Walley, Managing Director at the consulting firm Decipher, anticipates a blurring of functionality between in-home DVR recorders and on-demand systems. “The difference will become a commercial and legal one, not a technical one,” he predicts.

The convergence works in both directions, Walley says. “Firstly, recording capacity is beginning to move to the cloud. Secondly, PVRs are increasingly being used to host on-demand programming, as we see with push-VOD on Sky [in the UK] or Dish Network’s Primetime [Anytime] service.

“Our thinking is that over time, most consumer recording will move to the cloud, with the consumer PVR hard drive increasingly being used to support functions like start-over, where the last couple of hours of all the top channels are buffered, and also push-VOD promotions of HD and 4K movies.” 

Walley says the nDVR service will increasingly blend with buy-to-own movie services. “You will effectively have a Sky or Virgin branded type of Dropbox attached to your home PVR and you will be able to allocate storage to the PVR functionality and to your movie collection.”

Simmons agrees that local storage will remain useful. “The nDVR services that provide the best quality of service will be those that retain in-home storage as well, using it as an edge-cache to store live buffers and the most popular recorded and on-demand content, reducing the traffic burden on the network,” he predicts.

Wherever the lines are drawn between home and network storage, DVR as a function will probably remain a competitive differentiator for platform operators. As Nigel Walley observes: “The challenger OTT companies are all shying away from including broadcast functionality in their services, let alone PVR.”

His company has argued for some time that ‘pause live’ is the most under-valued function in TV right now. “It is the PVR function that people always forget about when they are waxing lyrical about OTT – it is actually equally or more important than ‘record’,” Walley declares.

More reading

This story is based on research in the recent Videonet report, ‘The Winning Formula For Network DVR’. The report also considers the likely nDVR user experience (including attitudes to ad-skipping), the role advertising can play in monetizing time-shifting and encouraging network recording rights deals, how nDVR could encourage binge-viewing on Pay TV platforms, and the technology that enables nDVR to grow cost-effectively. The report is free and you can download it here.